For many guys, when they are looking to start to lose weight then most start to make changes to their nutrition, which is great. Most start to adopt a healthier approach to the ingredients they use and start eating generally much healthier foods compared to before.
This is a great beginning step for anyone looking to make healthier changes, however, if you want to see consistent progress with your fat loss then food tracking can play a very important role.
It might seem a bit of a ball ache at the beginning, but food tracking is a great thing to do. Not only because of how accurate you can become with your food consumption, but also because it affords you a huge range of benefits. Here are 3 benefits that come because of taking the steps to track your food.
1. Keeps You In Complete Control
When you are aiming for a weight loss goal then it becomes important that you stay in some sort of control with your calorie consumption, because in order to achieve weight loss then we need to be in a calorie deficit. Without tracking your food, then this becomes near impossible to accurately measure.
When you start to track your food, you are required to set yourself an appropriate calorie goal to aim for each day. This goal is based on your weight, body fat%, activity levels and age. With this goal, you will then have a daily target that will keep you on track and enable you to keep control of your calorie consumption each day as you have been given a set target to hit.
This will get you moving in the right direction right away.
2. You’ll learn more about your food than you thought
For those currently not tracking their food, I am sure some will assume that since it is a healthy food, then there is no reason not to have plenty of it. This might come back to bite you in the arse, as there are many healthy foods out there that are actually quite high in calories and may slow down your weight loss efforts.
For example, avocado is a very healthy source of fats and is deemed a very healthy food that I have seen many people throw onto a salad without any thought. However, a medium avocado actually contains 240 calories. Add this on to the salad you have thrown it on, then calories quickly add up.
So when you begin tracking you will very quickly learn that many foods could be surprisingly good, or maybe surprisingly bad when it comes to calories. This will quickly get you thinking even more about your future food choices and future portion sizes also.
3. You’ll recognise both good and bad eating habits
When you first begin tracking your food you will very quickly pick up on what your current habits are like. For example, you may suddenly find that your seemingly mid-morning snack is actually a huge calorie bomb. On the other hand, you may then realise that your breakfast is in fact very filling and will see you through for a good few hours.
Without tracking then this is very hard to recognise, but ultimately it will enable you to sharpen up your habits and food choices to help you with your goal and feel healthier.